I have been told that Debian on an industrial PC with a Comapct flash and without hard disk is not a great idea cause the OS writes often on the main disk and this would hit with flash limited write amount is that correct? I am preparing a prototype for driving cameras and analyzing images. I do not need much stuff to run. Just my threads, a few servers like ssh or ftp and very probably also Eclipse to avoid cross compiling. Cannot I just install the minimal needed so that probably the OS will not write much on flash and corrupt it? Thank you

A quick couple of things: 1) Unless you buy a really cheap CF card, the read-write lifetime (even doing a read/write every second) is reported to be at least 10 years (some manufacturers claim a lifespan of 30 years+), so it's unlikely you'll kill it that quickly. 2) You can turn down logging and so on to minimize disk read/write, but you'll always get some activity, particularly if you're running servers and accessing images. I hope that's of some help; post back any more questions. Penguin